by Lucas
Derks
Introduction
Many people
see NLP its reputation jeopardized by incursions of superstitious (new age)
frames of reference. The low treshold marketing policy of most NLP institutes
facillitates the mixture of NLP with whatever other `facinating stuff'. So when
I started to give presentations about NLP and aliens, I triggered alergic reactions among many of my
NLP collegues. However, my reason to explore this subject is strictly
scientific. It is part of a reconnaisance beyond the outer edges of human
social cognition. Aliens are social constructions of a different kind. These
cognitive anomalies may help clarify the structure of what we consider obvious,
normal and natural. The question put central in this article is: What is the subjective
structure of the human concept of humans? Will the answer lie in our concept of
`non-humans'?
This article
is based on a workshop presented at the Dutch (IEP) conference for NLP april 2002. A
three minute selection of beautiful scenes from the science fiction move `The
Fifth Element' was shown before the 60 participants were asked to answer the
next questions.
The alien
belief questionare (ABQ)
1) Do you believe that life is restricted to earth? yes or no?
2) Do you believe that extra terrestial life forms may exist, but humans will never come across them? yes or no?
3) Do you
believe that aliens indeed do exist and we one day will meet them? yes or no?
4) Do you believe that alien life exists and some people already had encounters? yes or no?
5) Do you believe that aliens live among us? yes or no?
6) Do you believe that you yourself have encountered an alien? yes or no?
7) Do you believe that you had an intimate relationship to an alien? yes or no?
8) Do you
believe that you are an alien yourself? yes or no?
9) Do you believe all humans are aliens? yes or no?
10) Do you
believe that all life on earth stemms from sources outside our solar system?
yes or no?
Scoring the
questionare
Add for
every `yes' answered in the above questionare the number standing before the
question to the score. So if someone answered `yes' on question 3, than add 3
to the other yesses and the summ of their question numbers.
The lowest
passible score on this instrument is ‘1’.
The highest
score is ‘52'. For your orientation: The author scores ‘5' on this list.
Interpretation:
3 and below are the sceptics.
The
structure of social experience.
NLP makes us
focus on how people create their subjective experience. This transferred to the
social domain, confronts us with the vast human unconscious ability to create a
rich map of social reality. And it opens up the search for the cultural, common
and individual patterns in this tacit knowledge. What is the structure of
another person in your mind? How do you experience a group or even mankind at
large?
The
hypothesis, that a great skill to map out social reality houses in allmost everyone
is easy to validate; becouse, to be able to act socially as sophisticated as
most people do, they need an elaborated representation of their social
environment. In other words, given human social behavior, the social mental
software to make that happen must be in place. But how this unconscious social
cognition is given shape is a totally different level of enquiry.
To explore a
broad segment of subjective experience like ‘the social' we need to do what I
call ‘population modelling'. This is qualitative research with the aid of
introspective interviews of a large number of subjects. It takes the modeling
of many individuals to enearth the structural patterns in how people think of
people. After trying this in vain for some time, it came up on me that this
also took a new modeling tool. A tool to deconstruct the human experience of
‘humans'.
Aliens teach
the composition of humans
Recent
astronomical observations suggest that most of the universe is ‘steralized' by
frequent bursts of intense radiation caused by exploding superstars. This
implyes that life is very inproblable, and we are just an exception that is
waiting to be naturally nuked to oblivioun. Other astronomers argu that the
same nuclear phenomena are the source of all complex matter (amino acids), and
that life is in fact concieved that way. So since the whole universe is
scattered with exploding super nova's, life must be everywhere.
However rare
or abundant alien life may be in the cosmos, as a psychologist I believe that
aliens are very important to mankind. Non human, highly intelligent and
powerfull entities are occupying crusial positions in many peoples models of
the social world. The key roles in many acient mythologies are reserved for a
variety of non-human social beings: yes, you got me right, many Gods are in
fact aliens. To see this point you do not have to believe it to be realistic
like Von Daeniken suggested in the sixties.
In this
article we will contrast our concept of aliens with our concept of humans in
oder to get a clearer picture of what WE are. Without aliens we may stay
unaware of what our unconcious conception of ourselves is like.
The alien
encounter exersize.
Imagine, you lay in bed one morning. Deeply
relaxed, eyes closed, breathing as when sleeping. Than you wake up sligtly, to
hear a voice at your bedside. It's unlike anything you ever heard before, and
it whispers: ‘You think ME'. It is a voice that talks as if its owner is in
pain, but also with a refined articulation. And as it continues to speak: ‘I
will teach you YOU. So keep ME in mind.'
The alien
encounter reality exersize.
Now, go into a deep self-hypnotic trance and imagine
the above alien encounter to be real!
But as you
saw, there were no images, no lasers, no strange feelings, no handshakes, no ‘I
come in peace'. Just these small minimal sentences. So I wonder what adjustmens
must be made in the submodalities of your alien encounter to make it truely
real to you? Consider that for a moment. How must this voice sound like and
from where exactly should it orginate to make it convincingly realistic to you?
I can't
believe it's real.
My own alien
encounter exersize did put me face to face with a dramatic example of social
cognition. Becouse I failed to make the alien real. Primarely I missed the
visual and the kinesthetic. And the submodalities of the auditory were to wierd
too. So I believed this experienece, in sofar I noticed anything at all, to be
a sort of hynagogic hallucination. My primary conclusion was, that I made up a
fragmented social being in my mind.
Personification
theory
In the
dictionary one finds the verb `to personify'; which means, treating an
non-human object as if it had human characteristics. When we talk about a
computer and say that it is `wanting' something or is `feeling' something or is
`thinking' something, we are doing just that. We are personifying a machine. By
looking in the disctionary again, we may also find the noun `personification',
wich means a human who symbolizes abstract ideas and ideologies. Like: Madonna
is the personification of post feminism.
The
dictionary suggests that `to personify' and `personification' are mental
activities that need to include non-human concepts. But the alien encounter
excersize made clear to me that this is a typical mistake, stemming from us
being blind for our own unconscious abilities. The truth of the matter is that
we personify humans all the time and all over; and just rarely we apply the
same cognitive skill on non-humans. But only in the latter case this may catch
our (and the dictionary writers their) attention; becouse this time it strikes
us as being something strange. While on the other hand when we personify real
human beings, we will stay totally unaware of the proces, becouse it seems so
`natural and normal' to us. But my alien tutor showed me that it is neither
natural nor normal: it is a great miracle.
When one
orginates from outside the solar system it seems to be very clear that the
proces of `personification' consists of the creation of mental constructs that
are equal in structure to the construct of oneself. Humans expect other humans
to be rather similar to themselves becouse they are human too. Aliens who
expect humans to be largely similar to them, make often fatal mistakes. For
instance, when they assume humans to also be composed of crislatized gas they
tend to break down by a sheer lack of resonance in the higher frequencies. Than
aliens goes PLAPPP!!!
So most
aliens see that humans create man according to their own image. But things that
stand out to an alien, may take considerable time to be comprehended by an
earthling. Luckely, after a while I began to envision some outlines. For
instance: In the course of our social developement as a child, we start to
recognize elements in our own experience. We notice our feelings and desires.
From discouvering these in ourselves we start to generalize them to others. We
start to believe that others are similar to us. We project what we find inside
ourselves to others on a regulary basis. We have feelings, so we suppose others
to have feelings too. We have desires, so we also attribute these to our peers.
Believing that what others experience is similar to what we do experience
ourselves, is the core of the personification process.
With the aid
of the alien lesson that brought me the concept of personification, I gained
insight in how we think of something, to make it subjectively into a human
being. Dreaming about aliens is fun
until suddenly there stands a real one at your bedside. Would you be mentally
fit enough to emediately pace and lead? And to stay calm and curiuos? What
resources does it take to ask some relevant questions? For instance: `Hai
Alien! Do you as an outsider know the difference between social and non-social
human maps of reality?' And would you be clear minded enough to pick up the
answer? Suppose the alien idea about this is: "Your social map of the
world is mainly composed of personifications. Your non-social map is filled up
with everything else: mainly `objectivations'. And you may see
`objectivications' as the mental constructions that represent things. People
are also things, but more. They are objectivications plus. Personifications."
Would you be able to remember such an answer?
But if you
could recall this answer and take it seriously, it will lead up to only one conclusion,
which is, that, the human ability to personify helps us to discriminate between
humans and things, humans and plants, humans and animals, humans and humanoids
and between humans and aliens.
Science
fiction movies show that the distinction between `human' and `alien' often may
mean the difference between who will live and who will be eradicated. And most
of our contemporary youngsters learn to press their playstation buttons as
crazy when the images of aliens show up on the screen. But asked for it, my
alien friend said not to worry about that. It said: `These computer game aliens
don't look like us at all.' And it went on: `So nobody will ever shoot us. They
are simply not able to recognize us as aliens!'
It's no
miracle, that knowledge about human social representation was the first alien
lesson I received. Becouse for the aliens themselves this knowledge may be
quite crusial for their survival. It is the foundation of their day to day
strategy of blending in into our world.
The big
alien question exersize
Imagine, if
you would meet an highly intelligent alien, what are the three `big questions'
you want to ask? Write these down to be prepared. Have them at hand for in
case. Many people said they were totally stunned at the critical moment. So be
clear about it!
question 1:
question 2:
question 3:
Social
panorama
I must admid
I had a pretty hard time when my alien tutor started to critisize NLP. NLP, of
which I had always thought off as something without restrictions. `If one alien
in the world can do something, there is no reason to believe that you will ever
be able to... NLP provides you only with unlimited power within limits,' my
alien tutor joked. `NLP is the ideal tool to stay put within the human
matrix... People believe what accomodates them, false or true...' (these being
the last alien words I remember).
I must have
lost consciousness for a while... When I woke up again I was happily thinking
of NLP: I dreamt of beautifull outcomes, in wonderfull submodalities and
realized by outstanding unconscious parts. And I concluded that I rather cling
to my human limitations than try to model a real alien. So I went on `modeling'
people about how they created other people in their subjective experience.
The first anwers to this queste showed the
great importance of mental space in social thinking. We think of a person as
existing on a certain location within the imaginary space around us. In
general, all social constructs are tight to some location, and most people use
the sheer limitless variety of possible locations as their way to encode the
different qualities of their relations. Numerous experiements did validate the
premisse; saying that the quality of a relation is given shape by the location
where the person is experienced.
Than one
night my alien mentor returened to warn me once again for NLP's dead end
streets, saying: `NLP will take you to the limits of human thought, but no
further. You will become an expert in human subjectivity. But as soon as you
want to move beyond the neural truth, you will drift off in ever higher levels
of abstraction. You will end up in meta space... And he also said that the mere
absorbtion of neutral black energy would free me from spot bound mentation... '
In defence I
explaned to him that my modelling project had led to the developement of a new
tool called `the social panorama'. And that with its help one can analyse and
change the subjective patterns making up human relationships, in any disired
direction.'
`Is that
so?' the alien challanged me, with a cinical tone and wispered: `ANY direction,
hu!' Immediately after this it dissapeared, to never return again. Indeed, I
could not figure out in what direction it went...
This caused
a sort of earth quake in my mind. I felt guilt. Did I break a cosmic taboo by
being just pragmatic? My beliefs all tilted back and forth; cracks crumbling
their foundations. Only with the greatest of mental efforts I managed to return
to the assumptions of NLP again. The map is not the terretory; at least on
earth and for mankind. Finaly NLP proved to be an effective antidote against my
alien infestation. Thus, remember well my dear readers: minds contaminated with
neutral black energy can be washed clean with Frogs into Princes and the like.
Now the crusial
role of the submodality location in social life had become an undeniable fact
to me. Which gave rise to the clean language question: `And Alien whereabout
are you?'
Anyway, it
was no longer beside me. It was fully out of sight. However, when I still tried
to imagine it, it seemed to have taken on the submodalities of false memories. And
although aliens may be located everywhere, mine seemed gone. Did it realy
return to Alpha Centauri, to leave only some faint neural traces in my brain? Or
were these synaptic links in my nervous system its only real existence?
Just as in
the case of a loved one, the spot where we believe that an alien is located is
all decisive. Wether an alien is at close range or 10 million light years away
makes all the difference. But statistically speaking we must see that the
distribution of aliens in the universe makes them as problable at great
distance as just around the corner. And also, the universe is such large, that
even when aliens were one million times their size, chances to meet them would
not significantly increase.
So location
is the critical submodality in social life. And it is very difficult to imagine
aliens that have no specific location at all. But strange as it may seem, this
type of alien is very familiar to many of us. So familiar indeed, that we can
hardly speak of it as an alien. In our culture great numbers of people believe
in the existence of one great powerfull alien that is all over and everywhere. Isn't
that facinating!
Personification
factors
Another
finding as a result of my alien research had a more NLP-like character. It
became clear that the difference between a human and a non-human is made with
the aid of a set of unconsciously applyed criteria. A number attributes a
something needs in order to become classified as a somebody.
Knowledge
about these criteria becomes of great importance when you are in the busisness
of human to non-human communication: including contacts with spirits, angels,
plants, minirals, parts, gohsts, animals, gods, personified machines and
also... aliens.
As soon as I
started to explore the edges of the social domain, it became evident to me,
that most aliens do not satisfy the criteria for a common human. They fall
short of some of them and do have additional extras in other areas. However,
aliens seem to be more appealing to us, when they are more equal to us and
share as many human characteristics as possible. For instance, when we
discouver an alien with the intelligence of a patato, it will be far from as
exciting or bothersome as when its intelligence is little above our own. Also,
an alien who cannot express its intentions, beliefs or feelings will be a great
disssapointment to manny of us. We prefere aliens that look cute and are
socially a little clumsy but technically very advanced. Sort off, pet like
nerds. Like Spielberg's E.T.
As suggested
above, for regarding something to be an other human being, it needs to meet a
number of criteria. I call these the `personification factors'. When we create
a mental construct and put these factors all in, we end up with the idea of a
`person'. This fully unconscious proces of cognition helps us to produce the
builing blocks of our social panoramas. Let me list the most important ones for
you.
personification
facors: --- Spielberg's E.T.:
1) location one, small
2) abilities high tech but weak
3) feelings home sick
4) compassion yes
5) emotions curiousity
6) motives,
intentions, needs wanted to go home
7) self-awareness refers to self
8) own
perspective on the world seemingly
9)
consciousness clearly
10)
spiritual connection maybe
11) symbolic
expression, a voice languages
12) reason,
logic, intelligence profound
13) a name E.T.
14) sensory
experience yes
15) sensory
perceivability we all saw
him
Although
this list is incomplete, it's a great tool for the exploration of the structure
of social experience. Since with the help of a list like this we can scrutenize
any social construct. For instance, as you may have noticed, I have looked at Spielbergs
E.T. and found it had properties in all these 15 categories.
For seeing
the relevance of this, you must select at random one of the personification
factors and take it out. You emediately end up with a more alien person.
The
interesting thing for social psychology is, that all these personification
factors are regularly applied to humans. But in the same way that a person will
be crippled if you take out self-awareness or symbolic expression, so will this
turn a human into something alien. At wartime, in psychiatry and in the human
history of racism and colonialism, we see opponents or minorities represented
as failing crusial personification factors.
Aliens we
need You
When we
wonder if we are alone out here, and maybe hope this is not the case, we are of
course not thinking of evil aliens. In the movie `Indepencence day' like in
many others, we are presented aliens that for shure do have their own
perspective on the world (factor 8) and saw us mainly as a source of nurishment
(energy). They were motivated (factor 6) to consume us, and had an overload of
technical skills and power (factor 2) to make that happen. They seemed to know
the feeling of pain (3) but showed no compassion (4). Most people rather are
alone in the universe than in the company of violent egocentric, psychopatic
aliens.
So let's get
serious... What would it mean to you if there were aliens out there? Would you
like to make contact as if you were swimming with dolphins? And communicate to
them as if they were chimps who spoke sign language? What is your fantasy? What
are your hopes and wishes?
And what
difference would it make for the way you see yourself and mankind if they would
parade trough our cities?
Some movies
show how humanity come to be finaly united when aliens threathen our existence.
Other scenario's have people and aliens become intemate friends. In all these
cases aliens come to learn us to make peace. In some movies and in some
people's minds nothing else comes up as having sex with aliens. It seems that the
`otherness' of gender, age, race, handicap and culture can cause extra sexual
arrousing; the sexappeal of other species and beings from extra terrestial
origin may show the far end of hetero sexuality. Some people hope to be visited
by the type of aliens that are reputed to abduct people with a similar
intention. Or with the aim to experiment with genes, minds and bodies. These
aliens do what our scientist would do with them when they had a chance to. These
abductive aliens have been taken very seriuosly by some therapists. Case
research shows that some of these therapist in their turn have abductucted some
of their clients and even their children to safe them from aliens induced
traumas. We may say that the aliens in the minds of therapist and patients teach
us about the weeknesses in our mental healthcare and legal systems.
Create an
alien exercize
On
- Form pairs
of A's and B's.
- A will be
turned into an alien by B.
- For that
purpose A and B pick two personification factors from the list above. These are
considered not to be present in A anymore. Instead of these A and B pick two
`alienation factors' from the list below.
- When done,
B will train A to become an alien. Both think about the behavioral and
communicational implications of the changes. As soon as A knows how to be an
alien, the next stage of the exercise will start off.
- A will
move over to another pair, to have an encounter with the A from that other
pair. So all B's try to make contact with aliens that were trained by other
A's.
- The aim is
to ask the alien your three `big alien questions'.
Alienation
factors
1)
Invisebility or luminosity or transparancy
2) Being at
many locations simultaniuosly
3) Being
composed of negative matter: flash at contact.
4) Ability
to mind read and mind write
5)
Hydrophobia (like in the movie `Signs')
6) Ultra
high frequency laser eye communication
7) Hyper
echolalia (repeats all signals presented)
8) Ultra
sound vocalization (talks like an elephant)
9) Composed
of christalized metal (hyper fragile)
10) Lacking
a self concept
11) Without
emotions
12) Speaking
numbers
13) Command
dependent
14)
Antropophylic
15) Hyper
kinesthetic
Alien lesson
in logic
Once I asked
my alien tutor: `Are you real?'
It
emediately gave me an extra human intelligent answer. Although people normaly
tend to forget the things they cannot grasp; I do remember this in every
detail. The alien said: `Reality is contingencies and contiguities in patterns
that can never exceed the amount of units within the substrate. And althaugh
the entry gates into the substrate may vary; so why waste energy on being
anything more than a pattern of just the right amount of units?'
Did you
grasp that? No? Try harder!
In our
modern society most people do have some concepts of aliens. However, those who
are married to one will have quite different ideas than those who doupt their
existence. In fact some people have done much more work in this area than
others, but most humans these days, do have some thoughts about extra
terrestial beings.
For the NLP-type
explorer of subjective alien experience it is nice to know that most people can
be our research subjects. We may interview them zn the subjective status of
their `personal aliens', and ask them: When you think of aliens, what is it
that you see, hear or feel in your mind?
However,
alien research does not take experimental subjects, it can as easely be taken
on alone, sitting in front of your tv with a cold beer at hand, sampling with
the aid of your tv-dial. Aliens seem to be attracted to tv-sets, and they will
easely come to you!
But if you
want to study aliens in the field, I have one simple recommancation to make. Sleep
with open windows and go to the movies. It may be true that
Aliens teach
creativity.
The most
common movie aliens consist of an actor playing an alien that has taken on the
shape of a human. Such aliens are said to be transmorphic, and are only
recognizable becouse they fail one or more personification factors. For
instance, they cannot feel emotions. When they are also supposed to have a
certain alienation factor to them, this is often the thing that unmasks them. You
problably olso saw a dozen or so examples of these... I came to dislike these
movies. But these cheap aliens still teach us how easely people can step into a
story. When John Travolta played the role of an angel (=a certain type of
alien) the audience is easely made to belief that he is not Travolta but an
inmortal. It is just an hypnotic phenomenon; like most of the things going on
in a movie theatre. Aliens that are morphed into the shape of a human, don't
even have to dress up to teach us about ourselves.
Speaking for
myself; if a movie alien is not superbly animated or wearing a specatacular
outfit, it will not work for me. To my pity they are often not good enough.
Movie aliens demonstrate the inability of the human mind to conceive of
something inconceivable. What I mean is, that even the weirdest movie aliens,
when deconstructed, will always consist of bits and pieces of crockodiles,
spiders, ants, snakes, sharks, octopusses, dinosaurs, flying insects and
primates. The totally fresh, new, unseen, unheard concept is alien to our mind.
Even the great animation artists of the silver screen build their aliens out of
scaps of very familiar stuff. That is why most of their creations are no more
than men wearing funny suits. Real aliens never will look that familiar,
believe me.
Bored as I
am with some of them, I may on the other hand, be totally facinated by what in
fact is the cheapest category of
Aliens teach
us to be alone
At first sigth
there are the friendly and the unfriendly aliens: compare friendly E.T. with
the horrible ones of Independence Day. The alien that tought me my first alien
lessons tried to explane to me that thinking in terms of friends and foes,
good and evil, kept people from realizing what their place in the universe
realy is... But I myself never fully understood this teaching. I came no futher
than: `If we would experience humanity as a unity, we would be able to be
just that single one speck of awareness in a vast endless ocean of black matter.
But being occupied in social turmoil, economics, science and politics, we
are kept busy in the middle of an ongoing puppittheather with a never ending
story.' This interpretation sounds reasonable to me, but the alien just as
well may have ment something else. What it did make stand out to me, is the
common human fear of being alone in the cosmos. We tend to avoid the full
realization of what we are. When most people look up to the stars they think:
`Shit! I hope we are not alone out here!' Because they see that we hardly
seem to cope. That makes the prospect that never ever, any hyper intelligent
and compassionate alien ever takes care of us, very hard to digest.
Why is this
an issue? It shouldn't be one? Consider the fact that we live on earth with an
enormous variety of species, some of which are so weird, that we understand
them far less than we understand aliens. But for one reason or the other they
seem not to be good enough to be taken into account as our company. We may
delete them alltogether and imagine ourselves to be totally lost in empty space.
But to them, we may just be what we ourselves seek in intelligent,
compassionate and helpfull aliens.
Indian
tribesmen in the Amazonian rain forrest never feel alone in the cosmos (it
seems). They are surrounded by the spirits and souls of their ancesters, plants
and animals and all kinds of monsters. In their social panoramas is no room for
loneliness. They seem never to consider aliens. So it takes a western view to
create a social panorama around oneself that opens up the questen: `Are we
alone?'
The hyper
lonelyness exersize
So the
question to fucus on is: Are we alone in the universe? Are we the onlyones that
are aware?
Now
consider:`Yes we are!'
Some
meditators explaned to me that feeling oneself alone in the universe, as the
sole spot of awareness, comes close to one of the most healing spiritual
experiences of all, still better than a near death experience. But on the other
hand, the feeling of being the only living soul in the cosmos is being feared
as hell (or seen as its equivalent).
Most of us
prefer the idea of having company.
Aliens teach
us space travel
In the
seventies we learned that earth is a perfectly designed space craft. Together
with the rest of the solar system it races through the galaxy. Conclusion,
space travel has alwys been our business. And we have traveled inconceivable
distances this way. Did we meet aliens in the course of our flight? Did they
build Atlantis and help the Egyptians create their culture? Some say that
spores of ferns and fungy may actually leave the earths admosphere to spread
out into space. Thus, we may also be inavaded by spores from other planets in
the same way. Some pieces of cosmic ice may reach the earth and deposit organic
matter in between us.
Last night I
looked up to mars. Looking back from mars to earth will be approximately the
same sight; maybe a little bigger, maybe a little blueer. NLP can be part of
the science fiction psychology we need to be able to cope with long distance
space travel. We need to be able to maintain peace within a team enclosed in a
narrow capsule. The fears that may overwhelm a space traveler entering alien
terretory need acute treatment with effective means. NLP-like imagination
excersiszes may help to simulate in advance the crossing of mental barriers
that will nessasarely pop up when we fly so far away. When we become wandering aliens
ourselves.